FEATURES

AN INTERVIEW WITH ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT

Gregory Donovan:
There were a couple of things that your poem, Ellen, really put me in
mind of, things that it brought
to my attention
and reminded me about your work. One of them is what I'm going to articulate
as an impression that your work is very much using language in the service
of a particular
effect
that you want to have happen in the reader's mind. Now maybe that's describing
all poetry, but I don't think it is anymore. I don't think it actually
is describing all poetry. For example, in the section of your poem that
we're publishing, "The Feeder," where you say "Suddenly there
suddenly gone." Ordinarily, I might say to a student, "Now, if you
want something to happen suddenly, don't say 'suddenly.'" However, it
just shows the difference between a beginner and a professional that
what's
happening there, of course, is that for me, that's the wing beat of the
bird as it comes in and as it goes away. What sort of attention have
you put to that and what kind of aesthetic backdrop does that kind of
commitment to those sorts of sonorous effects in your poetry, what
does that grow out of? Or is that something principled on your part?
How are you feeling about that?

Ellen Bryant Voigt:
Well, I've always loved best about poetry the music of it. I think that
that's our chief tool.
And I've come
to start thinking about two sorts of music over the past ten years. Before
that, I thought mainly about the music of the line and what you could
do line to line to line, whether it's a regular line length or whether
it's open verse. In the past ten years, I've started to realize that
there's this other system, which is the music or the rhythm of the sentence.
And that the mind, really, is there to play either with or against what's
happening in the sentence. I don't know if that addresses your question
entirely, but the music of it, the sounds of it.

I've been re-reading Mr. Frost and what he
said about sentences and the sound of sense—the dramatic sentence.
So that's what I've been
trying to pay attention to. "Suddenly there suddenly gone" is held together
by one unit and reinforced by putting that in one line so that then the
absence of the punctuation has an effect, right? It's like tempo. You're
a musician, so you know what that is. So it's a way of managing tempo,
and other places where I want to slow it down, or want to put in a pause
that would not exist in the sentence to sort of play off against that.
Let's see if I can give you a little example of that. Well, from the
same poem: "Suddenly there suddenly gone. / Do they count / if they
come not to the back yard but the front."

So that's a way to put a pause into the sentence
that it wouldn't have. "Do
they count if they come not to the back yard but the front" would be
the prose sentence. So this is a way to increase a pause and then also
make it possible that a reader might hear a little off-rhyme on "count" and
"front."
And just the consonants in there will also manage tempo. Tone, I think,
comes out of the management of sounds, comes out of the management of
the rhythms, the two rhythms—rhythm of the sentence, rhythm of
the line—and then the musical effect also of the vowels, and whether
they're high or low.

GD: It's definitely
in the service of the drama of the poem and of the presentation of its
imagery and action.
And I think
other poets sometimes either just blink that away, they're only paying
attention to the meaning of the word and not its musical effect, or they're
only
interested in the musical effect of the word for its own sake and not
in the service of anything outside of that.

EBV: Yeah, well,
I'm guilty of having done that when I first started writing. I was so
in love
with the sounds that the rest
didn't matter. I realized this to my chagrin. I had an occasion to go
back and look at early drafts of something. I was visiting a class on
revision, and when I was looking through the big box that I throw everything
into, and I went back to really early drafts—first, second, third drafts
of poems—what I saw was that very often I would hear it before I had
any language, and I would put a scansion in. And I was a little horrified
to see that, because once you hear that relationship between, say, stressed
and unstressed syllables, then sort of any word will do, right, to fulfill
that. And so that was something that I really had to work on. That was
something that I had to learn, was to make sure that it was in service
of whatever overall intent of the poem . . .

In this particular poem, "The Feeder," because
it's in ten sections, I need the ten, they all sit there at the
same dramatic place, right?
I mean, it's all looking at the same place so that there's a high degree
of reoccurrence that's going on just in the materials of the poem. So
then, what's moving? Where are the moving parts? It's got to develop
somehow. And it seemed to me that there could be a little development
or a little arc in the speaker, the person who tells us this, who is
looking for certain things at the beginning, in the first sections, and
then is forced to see some other things at the end. So that's a little
sort of psychological narrative that allows the poem to move. But another
thing that could move would be tone. I don't really have anything comic
here, because I'm not a comic writer. But to play with that a little
bit, so that there would be some variety from section to section. And
also, I hope, some sort of ongoing arc that comes from the development
of tone. And, as I've said before, I don't know what else manages tone
quite so well as the management of sounds.

GD: You know,
there's another effect that I think is really characteristic in your
work, certainly in Shadow of Heaven,
I think, which has to do with the way in which you're using nature. I
think only a wise poet would be courageous enough to exercise the kind
of humility that your poems are showing. That is, you're clearly, carefully,
and attentively receiving as much as you are dominating the landscape
and willing it to deliver some lesson or some illustration. Isn't that
the point of your poem, in a way, that it's about taking in what is there
and perhaps not noticed unless you're actually exercising a certain type
of humility? And it seems, here we are in New England, and of course
I'm very much noticing that in driving around here. And, you know, Emerson's
spirit hovering over everything. Emerson's important to you more generally.
I mean, you refer to him specifically in poems in Shadow of Heaven.
But here it seems like he's kind of, in a way, a presiding spirit, is
that right?

EBV: Yeah, I
think that's probably right. There's another thing I had to learn. I
mean, I had to learn about
listening and watching
and receiving, rather than arguing. I think that I had an impulse for
many years to sort of argue with the natural world. Or to argue with
whatever set it up and got it going. Maybe some of that's growing up
on a farm, seeing some other side of it. I've never been tempted to sort
of romanticize in any kind of way. I mean, it's all about will, isn't
it, it's about will.
I'm a very willful person. So to get to the place where I could listen
and sort of receive something and not rage against it. Or want to change
it. Or put an imprint on it. So some of that is just years, I think.
Some of that is age, and some of that, too, is having some tools in the
toolbox that you can bring to that. I've always been one very committed
to the technae, to the made thing. Poems are also utterance,
and so I think that to develop a set of tools, craft tools that will
help one
toward utterance and toward vision. Sure, Emerson, yes. Elizabeth Bishop
is another one. Elizabeth Bishop is all about listening and watching,
right? It's all about listening and watching. And then making
a text that is transparent.

GD: I think that's another
aspect of the humility that I was talking about. I started out as a
poet myself influenced very much
by Marianne Moore and then ultimately by Elizabeth Bishop, too, of course.
And it seemed to me—or it seems to me now looking back on it—that what
they were teaching me was not only humility before the subject, but humility
before the techniques of writing as well. That the poet was ill-serving
his or her work when the poet was foregrounded rather than the work itself
in some fashion.

EBV: And even,
I think, beyond that, even with an attention to subject beyond foregrounding
the poet. I mean,
if you think about
something like early Lowell, and the sort of torqued-up music of that,
that foregrounds the poem rather than the poet. But it puts the poem,
then, between the reader, or the listener, the reader and the subject,
or the world, rather than delivering the reader into the world, into
experience.
That's what I think Bishop was such a genius at. It's not only that she
doesn't come between us and the poem, the poem doesn't come between us
and the world, so that's what I mean by transparent.

GD: Clearly a very Emersonian word.

EBV: Yes, that's right.

GD: When I lived
out west for a time in artists' colonies, and I also went to graduate
school out there, I very much
felt that that
landscape was teaching me things and encouraging [in] me a certain attitude
that then carried over into just daily business of life. And I think
the same thing is true of New England, and the New England background
of Marianne Moore and ultimately of Elizabeth Bishop herself . . .

EBV: Yeah.

GD: . . . She came from even further north
of us than where we are right now, but certainly northern climes, northern
landscapes
. . . and there's a certain quality of contemplation that comes out of
this region.

EBV: Yeah, I
think that that's true. I also think that, you know, if you stay in one
place, I mean, the thing
that's pretty amazing
about Bishop was that she was traveling around, and you have a number
of landscapes, then, that become important to her poems. Certainly in
Florida, certainly in Brazil. But in Brazil, I mean, once she gets
the house, and once she stays in the same spot . . . and I've been in
this same spot since 1971 . . . and I think that there's a kind of excitement
over the new and the exotic that can come to play in poems, but then
there's another thing that happens when it's so absolutely familiar and
yet not. The response to it, I think, has to be something like wonder.
Because if you look out my back door and see the same things
that you saw, except they're not quite, and so that that sense of something
circadian, something seasonal, those kinds of changes, and the power
behind it, that that's,
you know, that's going
to take over everything. Or you look out the other way: that used to
be an orchard across the road. That was cleared land and that was an
orchard. And now it's grown up, first scrub and now we have some hardwoods
in it, you know. So that sense of something much larger and exceedingly
mysterious, very mysterious. And if you're just sitting still—this sounds
very kind of Zen, or something—but if you're just sitting still, then
some of that play, I think, records itself on one. Depending on your
temperament. For my temperament, it's a good thing. Again, to sort of
correct the will.

GD: Those are
qualities that you have written about and pondered extensively in the
flexible lyric, as well. Is that
not
the case? And we've talked about this before,
trying to understand these terms at all is difficult. I mean, the lyric,
that word
is one that I've proven to myself and to students has been used so widely,
variously that it almost . . .

EBV: It's a vexed word.

GD: It can be used as something argumentative
or just . . . it can be used pejoratively.

EBV: Yes.

GD: On the other hand, you don't use it pejoratively.

EBV: No.

GD: You're a devotee.

EBV: I am. Yes, I am.

GD: What qualities
do you see maybe threatened or misunderstood about the lyric and poetry
of our period that we're
seeing of late?
I think every poet feels like she or he is fighting for something in
their work, so that they're advocating for something even if it's simply
by example, in their work. But I think, it doesn't feel like that to
me. I think every poem is a statement in a larger statement of aesthetics.
What do you see yourself fighting for?

EBV: Oh, well.
I don't know that I'm fighting anymore. You watch these things
come and
go. I think that part of the
problem with the lyric was to go through that post-confessional period.
I think that there was a kind of reaction against that. All of the things
that we think of as being properties of the lyric . . . that ability
to stop time really is just there so that emotional complexity can come
into
the poem. If you're moving ahead on the plot line, if you're moving ahead
on action and event, it's not that you can't have feeling in a narrative
poem—I certainly don't mean to say that—but that simultaneity of several
different layers of feeling, and sometimes contradictory feeling: joy
and grief at the same time, you know, anger and rue happening at the
same time, all of that happening at the same time.

What the lyric can do by holding us in one
place, not letting us move—and
by place I mean one moment in time—it allows for some of that nuance
and some of that complexity to come into the poem. I think that by locating
much of that within a single sensibility, or speaker, who puts that in
the foreground, puts that sensibility in the foreground, which is the
way I see confessional poetry. I think after a while we got tired of
that, and, after a while, some of that poetry became mannered. I think
about,
say, the first two books by Anne Sexton, as opposed to the last couple
of books by Anne Sexton. There was a way in which this is not just confessionalism,
but this happens very often. You find out something that you can do,
and you continue to do it. And I think that there was a reaction against
that that said, Oh, please, not another poem in which the poet puts herself
foremost and talks about her deepest concerns and ills and whatever.

GD: I've been
around long enough to witness a remarkable transformation of students'
attitudes towards the work
of Sylvia Plath,
especially. I mean, Anne Sexton is kind of a different case because she's
always continued to stake out a certain territory that's so identifiable
and has, I think, in my experience of how I've watched other people experience
her work, that hasn't changed a lot . . .

EBV: Yeah.

GD: Some things
have changed because the political climate and the nature of feminism
and all that has grown
and changed and developed
over the years, but a certain truculence on her part still has that kind
of . . . it appeals to readers in the same certain way. With Sylvia Plath,
it's almost as if, when students encounter her now—or other readers that
I am witnessing them read her work—it's as though they're seeing a completely
different person. My most recent experience of watching, or witnessing,
some readers take a look at her work, young readers, they were extremely
annoyed by her, and found her responses to the world just unconscionable
and irritating. And
I felt like, Are you looking at the same poem I'm looking at? I can see
why you might . . . Their
attitude
was perhaps summed up in that: Get over it, lady! They seemed
to have that attitude, and so drastically different from what young women,
especially, felt when I was a young poet and that sense of kinship and
identification and a breakthrough of freedom that they found in that
work. But that seems to me to be the vagaries of what happens when personality
is foregrounded in the work. And I think, actually, she's unfairly characterized
that way.

EBV: I think
she's very unfairly characterized that way. And I think that, also, you
know, we bumped into the age
of biography
and the age of Oprah. And so that there was a greater interest in her
life and the fact that she killed herself than there was in reading the
poems as poems . You know, I think we'll pass through this.
I think we'll pass through that response on the part of your students,
and get to something else, which is, you know, people who have not been
inundated with all of the biographical stuff. And also some other way
of getting to the collections as she intended them and not as Ted Hughes
arranged them. I mean, he arranged Ariel, right?

GD: Right.

EBV: And this
was not the order that she had in mind. And then he published everything
after that. Or we think
so. We can't
be sure—since he burned some journals, he could have burned
some poems. But her poem-making has been occluded from us for quite some
time
now. I think that what will last with her is intensity, and I think we'll
come to the point where the speaker of those poems is no more recognizable
to us as a person in the world than, say, the speaker of the Shakespearean
sonnets. I think that that will happen, and when that happens, I think,
then, we'll be in a place to go back and look at her craft.

GD: That's it.

EBV: Look at the craft!

GD: That's what
makes that possible, isn't it? It's her devotion to craft.

EBV: Absolutely,
absolutely. But, it's been very hard, I think, over the past fifty years,
to read the poems as
craft. Instead,
they're read as the, you know, the cry from the suicide. And it's not
that she just . . . even when she was writing quickly, she was still
paying very, very careful attention to rhythm and to sentence structure,
and you can see it, by comparing some of the earlier poems that are written.
They're incised. They're sort of syllable by syllable. What she started
to do with the Ariel poems was to, indeed, write sentence-driven,
syntax-driven, poems. It's a very different music. An entirely different
music.

So I think we'll come to the place where
we do read those in terms of how they were made, and I think that she
was a great craftsman and
a greater talent than Anne Sexton. I think that Anne Sexton has, well
. . . there is that kind of intensity of feeling in the first two books,
you can feel the pressure of it. And then, after that, she becomes her
persona,
I mean, the same persona over and over. And, it seems to me that those
last books, the poems are just not as well-made. I mean, not
only are we tired of hearing the same stories, but I think that they're
not as well-made.

Yeah, these things, you know, there's always this
kind of cycle to it. For a while, then, narrative sort of came in to
replace this sort of "the narcissistic
lyric." I don't think it has to be narcissistic. I mean,
do we think of the Shakespeare sonnets as narcissistic? No, we don't.
But I
think that in kind of reaction against . . . then we were looking for
other things, so we went through a sort of neo-narrative period. And
then we went
through
the neo-formalists' attempt to try to foreground more clearly the
making of the poems. I mean, I think that that's what a lot of that is
about, where rhyme comes back into fashion and strict meter comes back
into fashion. Then we have, again, a sort of a move in the avant-garde
to take all of the elements of narrative out of the poems, right? Any
suggestion
of an actual person in an actual place in an actual dilemma, then that
gets taken out. And instead we sort of move the language around on the
page as John Cage might, right?

GD: Yeah. Or abstract painting.

EBV: Yes. Or
abstract painting. Very abstract painting. So these things, they have
their own life,
and I think that that's good.
I think that those pendulum swings are good, because then that allows
for other people to come along and make up some new kind of poem, some
new way to do this, rather than getting stuck under the shadow of something.
I don't think that we have had, in America, the single great figure
since Lowell died. Maybe Merrill. Merrill comes pretty close and Ashbery,
I guess, comes pretty close. But even with those two figures, I think
that if you did a poll, if you took a poll right now, and said, "Who
is the greatest living American poet?" I bet if you ask fifty people,
you're going to get at least forty names. I mean, I don't think that
there is
consensus
about that, and that's great, because, you know, you think about the
generation before mine, and all those people having to write under the
shadow of, certainly, Lowell and Berryman and those figures, and they
themselves under the shadow of Yeats and Stevens and Williams and . .
. where, then,
there
were only certain kinds of poems that could be written. Now, I think,
any kind of poem can be written. And so that's bound to be a
very good thing.

GD: You find
people, certainly, mixing qualities together. Well that's something that
you . . . in your talking about
the lyric, though,
I've heard you mention that all strong lyric is rooted in the narrative,
so it's not exactly a kind of . . . it's not a battle. It's a relationship.

EBV: Yeah, well.
Yeah. For me, I use those terms very, very narrowly. And for me, the
only thing that makes any
sense is to
think about the structure of the poem. If you just go right on back to
Aristotle, and he pointed out that there are three great structures.
One works in time, with time. It is sequential. And
it's based on action, and action that has some relationship to character,
and has consequences. That's what it can do, better than any
of the other structures. The other structures being dramatic structure,
where something is enacted and there's a struggle between two equally
forceful figures. Or two equal forces, if you want to think
of it that way. The antagonistic and the protagonistic forces. And it
could turn out either way. We don't know how it's going to turn out.
And that's what we watch being enacted. That has an immediacy that
none of the other structures can accomplish. Narrative knows that and
that's why now, if you sit in on a fiction workshop, they're talking
all the time about scene. Right? There talking about scene.
And they're saying, you know, "Watch out for too much narrative summary." Well,
I mean, I you know, The Iliad is full of narrative summary.
But that's what the dramatic structure can do.

Then the lyric structure, as I've said before, it
seems to be what it can do, better than the others, is to hold us at
one place
in one dilemma.
And then, what radiates out from that center and from that suspension
of time is feeling, complicated feeling. There's no reason why elements
of the others can't be brought into any one. Just as narrative has borrowed
a whole lot from the dramatic, I think that the lyric has borrowed a
whole lot from the narrative in our age, in our time. So if you think
about, you know, the sort of disembodied poet of a hundred years ago,
where it was all mask, up to what we have now, where there is an identifiable
poet, usually first person "I," and the reader invited to think that
that is the poet. It's still a persona, I mean, it's still a kind of
mask, but that's borrowing from narrative what narrative can do about
getting the reader engaged, right? Getting the reader sympathetic. But,
for me, a choice for the writer has to do with structure. Do you have
a story to tell? Do you have
a series of
actions? Do they have consequences? Or not?

GD: The quality,
though, that you're talking about, to focus on time in poems. In the
poem that you've given us, "The
Feeder," one of the things that's happening is it's like a string
of pearls—they're a series of lyrics. The series aspect of it affords
duration.

EBV: That's right.

GD: And development.

EBV: That's right.

GD: And those are narrative qualities . .
.

EBV: Yes, they are.

GD: But on the other hand, I wouldn't
necessarily call that poem, in any of the traditional senses, a narrative.

EBV: I wouldn't
either. Because nothing really happens except birds come, or don't come.
So I agree. But again,
one can borrow
this sort of movement through time, or this change. If you have change,
and if it's not sudden—I mean, if you're writing a sonnet, you
can put change
in there in the volta. It's all one thing and then, Zap!—it's
all the other thing. So you can allude to change that way, but
it's not change over time. It's not a development. It's not a change
in how one views the world, or any of those things. "The Feeder" uses
a couple of little seasonal references, right? So that you move to the
snow pack, and then you move to March and spring coming. So that
little passage of time . . . but I would agree absolutely: I don't think
that it's a narrative poem, it just borrows a little piece of the narrative
structure.

GD: Well, you know, another
element in some of my favorite poems by you is that you will—talking about this borrowing and hybridization—is
from the dramatic. And the dramatic effect that I find that I really
treasure, and wait to see if students will catch it in your poems, is
when you will slip in the snake in the garden. What is that poem in?
Is it the title poem?

EBV: Yeah, The
Lotus Flowers.

GD: "The Lotus
Flowers" is
the one that has the snake in the spring. I teach some fiction-writing
classes, and I'm
telling them, "Okay, Flannery O'Connor has the misfit coming up the road,
and the only hint of what's about to happen is it's a big, battered,
hearse-like automobile. There's tonal effect, but when it comes to her
revealing that they have guns, she just says, "They each had guns." It
is just quickly revealed, no drama about that at all. And so, therefore,
heightening the drama by understatement. And that's an effect that I
find a lot
in your poems.
And it seems like that's of a piece with a certain rigor about a kind
of humility before the material, and before the technique. Does that
seem like an accurate . . . ? I mean, you're seeing yourself portrayed
badly here?

EBV: No, I think that that's very smart.
I think that that's very smart.

GD: The poems
are created, at times, to lie in wait for you. It's not misleading—it's
not that. It's nothing overtly
trying
to take you in a direction that it's going to jerk you away from. But
it seems like you actually believe there always is a snake in the . .
. well.

EBV: Yeah, I
do. Yeah, I do. That's true. And sometimes, you know, you're looking
at the wrong place. I
almost
miss them. No, I think that that's a very fair characterization. And
I would go so far as to say I think even the narrative poems that I've
self-consciously tried to write, they have more of that sort of dramatic
structure in
them. And they also try to make these pockets
of stalled time. The one that you're talking about, "The Lotus Flowers,"
it's, there's the snake and then a long descriptive passage,
right? The narrator doesn't do anything. I mean, this is not
D. H. Lawrence and pick up the jug and throw it. And the snake doesn't
do anything either.
It's just this long descriptive passage—there is the snake, and then
the snake is described like the girl with her head on her crossed arms
on the sill. So that that, I hope, is a moment of recognition, somehow,
that the snake is not completely alien, but there's something of the
human, there's something . . . and it's not . . . it doesn't
say. This is a child's experience, so it doesn't say what that thing
was revealed. But something, I hope, implied that it's revealed through
just
tempo, pacing—what we were saying—pacing and structure. Because then,
you know, after the poem looks at the snake for a very long time, then,
you
know, I lug the bucket back. So then it just picks up the narrative.
And life goes on.

GD: Right, yeah. Using the terms that you
were using about narrative creating consequence. Those consequences
that are created
in narrative have to do with the characters who are involved in those
narratives, and so it's going to be a particular consequence for a particular
person, arising out of the events in their lives, or events in the poem
or story. But it is not the case, however, that your poems are without
consequence. But the consequence rises up larger than the individual.
This is, very much, it strikes me, like Asian philosophy, in that you
go through this keyhole, you go through this small point, and you burst
out into a realization that's rather large. And, you know, to use a dangerous
term, universal. Or just human. And that strikes me as something
that's happening in your poems where you're observing nature.

EBV: Well, I
think that that is the presumption of the lyric. And I think even the
most confessional, in quotation
marks
. . . even the most confessional kind of poem that you can think about.
The presumption is that the emotional life is what we all have in common.
Anybody's story is individual, is unique. Anybody's story, just what
happened when. So, you know, you've got all these millions of different
stories on the planet, and that can also get us to something universal,
too, right? And it seems to me that the presumption there, with the narrative,
is you take that story line and it turns out to be similar to other
people's stories, to the story of the reader. I mean, the reader can
find herself in that story even though the details are very, very different.

So I don't mean to say that narrative is not also
reaching for the universal, but I do think that the lyric, because it
is focused on the
emotional life, that is what we all have in common. I don't care what
your story is, and how it's different from my story. Anger is anger.
Grief is grief. Joy is joy. You know, what you feel when you're experiencing
that is the same as what I feel when I'm experiencing that. So that the
lyric occasion is just sometimes it might be highly autobiographical
because
it's just familiar. It's at hand. But it has within it the
potential of touching that third rail. Touches that third rail which
is, I think, the emotional life. And that is what connects us all. That's
what connects us all. So the more a lyric poem leans toward narrative,
the more it borrows from some of those presumptions that you can have
idiosyncratic detail as a way of getting the reader involved to get to
that point, you know, where the universal thing happens. it doesn't have
to do that. It doesn't have to do that. And you can think of poets who
actively try to shear away some of that idiosyncratic detail and leave
something
out there that's almost unauthored.

Think of some poems by Jean Valentine, say, where
a lot of the narrative information is withheld, or taken out. It's just,
you know, it's disregarded,
so that there's something more sort of purely lyric that's coming at
it. I don't think that my work does that. I think that mine is over there
somewhere closer with that edge with the narrative on one hand and dramatic
structure on the other. Where there are two kind of forces at work and
either one could win out. You just don't know which one is going to win
out. And sometimes one of those forces is that individual speaker poet,
however you want to think about it, who is willful, and who knows things
or wants to know things or has an argument to make with the world.
That can be one of those forces against the world itself.

And there has to be, I think, the possibility that
either one could prevail. There has to be the sense that the human mind
can get at something,
which is very non-Zen, which is very Western, right? That by using all
parts of your brain that you could come to an understanding about something
full of mystery. Maybe, and maybe not. And that, I think, becomes a kind
of enacted struggle. Certainly in the last book, and maybe in "The
Feeder," too. I don't know, don't you think that that watcher is
a little kind of obnoxious at the beginning of the poem?